My Long Term Memory Fails Me

I can't really remember how I first began to quilt. I'll try to throw out some thoughts. In high school I hand-pieced several blocks of carpenter's square to make a quilt for my "hope chest". (I didn't have a wooden chest, but did have the concept and was preparing things for life after high school.) I have no clue as to what happened to the blocks...they were never finished into a quilt. Probably my first quilts were baby quilts I made when I was pregnant with my daughter. For one I used a 1-inch gingham check and fussy-cut the fabric so that 9 one-inch squares of the check worked as a "cheater's 9-patch". I alternated these squares with white fabric. DD still has that quilt. Another baby quilt was a child's applique design that I found in Farm Journal magazine. My curved edges were pointy, to say the least. LOL. A year or so later, I made her a larger quilt, using rectangles of garish yellows and hot pinks of the 1970s. Money was tight and I believe I used bath towels for batting...they were ancient and had been worn thin by years of use. Backing was part of an old sheet. I believe I hand quilted (poorly, I'm sure) the gingham quilt. The applique and the yellow/pink quilts were tied. About that same time I made a crazy quilt, using my cotton sewing scraps. Each block was sewn to a square taken from an old sheet. This was a very heavy quilt for there was a layer of stitched fabrics (the crazy Q design), the layer to which they were sewn, then the batting which I believe was an old drapery fabric, and a backing (again, an old cotton sheet). In the eighties, a quilt shop opened up in town and I began to borrow Q books from the local library. Local quilters had gifted the library with a mat and rotary cutter and I borrowed them to make my first log cabin quilt. I was hooked. The rest, a hundred or so quilts later, is history. I've made donation quilts, baby quilts, recycled fabric quilts, artsy quilts, challenge quilts. Lately I'm slowing down... After a year's absence from the sewing machine, I'm finally starting a new quilt. I'm guessing most ladies my age (silver hair era) began their quilting career in a similar fashion, having first used their sewing machines to sew clothing for self and family. My! My! Times have changed, and our experiences must sound as strange to our grandchildren's ears as our grandmother's must have sounded to us.
JudyPete